FreeOCR

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Editors' Review

No matter how big of a scanned or PDF file you have, this program can handle it. Free OCR will read an otherwise uneditable document and churn out copyable text you can manipulate however you like.

With support for more than 10 different languages, this software impresses with both its accuracy and speed. It churns out an editable version of a small section of text in seconds, but only takes a minute or two to read documents with tiny text or bizarre formatting. You can even crop out sections of the document you don't need to shave seconds off of the OCR's output. It doesn't offer many features outside of character recognition, but it doesn't really need to. The PDF support is great and you can scan documents right into the FreeOCR with ease. Its spacious layout gives you enough room to find and copy just the text you want if you only need a section of the document. The only downside of this program is that not many people will need it, as OCR software usually comes standard with most modern printers.

For anyone still wrestling with an old freebie printer they got when they bought their computer or their office, FreeOCR is a lifesaver. It's a light, friendly program that delivers one of the most accurate and efficient OCR readouts you can find.

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Publisher's Description

FreeOCR is a free Optical Character Recognition Software for Windows and supports scanning from most Twain scanners and can also open most scanned PDF's and multi page Tiff images as well as popular image file formats. FreeOCR outputs plain text and can export directly to Microsoft Word format.
Free OCR uses the latest Tesseract (v3.01) OCR engine. It includes a Windows installer and It is very simple to use and supports opening multi-page tiff documents, Adobe PDF and fax documents as well as most image types including compressed Tiff's which the Tesseract engine on its own cannot read .It now can scan using Twain and WIA scanning drivers.

I have nothing positive whatsoever to say about this product, I registered only to post this warning

Cons

Malware. Carefully installed to make sure I didn't agree to any "offers" etc - within seconds of installing AVG was going crazy and all my browser search results were hijacked, have tried uninstalling, running scans, running adaware and there is still something lurking on my system. Please avoid this software if you value your safety and sanity, I expected better from somewhere like this site I will be much more careful what to trust in future.

Summary

Absolutely painful and awful experience, I don't know how this is allowed to be listed on here.

This is the most Malware infected program I have ever installed. Even after running Malwarebytes Pro to remove all the infections this program gave me, I am still having my Chrome Search engines modified and my home page modified. This website just lost a lifetime customer.

Easy to set up and easy to use with many great features. Absolutely zero malware issues as mentioned by some other reviewers although I should say I downloaded the program directly from the publishers website.

I used this on only one file so far..so this may not apply to you. I saved an image of historic congressional approval as a .png image. I downloaded FreeOCR using Cnet direct download...it downloaded an installer that sought out other files to download...AVAST screamed "malware site" and blocked part of the download. I then downloaded FreeOCR from softpedia Full download of program 10.8mb. No malware warning when I installed that.
I tried it on the .png file and got gibberish. I then printed that same image file to a .pdf and tried FreeOCR on the .pdf...the results weren't perfect...if it's important..proofread and compare to source...but it was probably 98% correct and the errors weren't hard to spot.

Full of malware which gets installed even if you decline all third-party products in the initial phase of the install.

Summary

Despite declining all invitations to install third-party products during the initial phase of the install they have hidden 2 other malwares in the later stage of the install. I noticed when my PC ground to a halt and so I crashed out of the installer but still found a browser search hijack and another malware had installed themselves. Both uninstalled OK but CNET shouldn't be encouraging this bad practice ... other third-party software should NOT install by default otherwise it is malware.

Installs a bunch of malware and hijacks browser search engine. Also fiddles with browser settings, especially the startup behaviour (bad if you rely on your browser remembering your windows/tabs from last session)

Summary

AVOID. This software should be removed from cnet asap. Reported multiple times but cnet has not taken action.

The actual OCR program did manage to convert my scanned document into text rather accurately as far as the word content is concerned. It doesn't actually format the text well though. Very simple without many bells and whistles. Not worth it considering the malware though.

Cons

MALWARE! Without any option to ignore, this program installed V-Bates application and a "Search Protect" application by Conduit. It hijacked all my browsers, changed all their settings (including my settings to keep my tabs open on exit, I lost a lot of tab history because of this), and I started getting random ad popups that ruined my original navigation. Maybe the FreeOCR software itself is well-intentioned, but they should not have allowed these bloatware programs to be bundled with it.

Summary

DO NOT DOWNLOAD THIS!!! I saw it had a high download count, but that must have been from previous versions. There are other options out there. AVOID THIS ONE!!!

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